government

As the presidency of Trump seems to loom ever larger, The Internet Archive has taken precautions. Precautions against a presidency that, if Trump's previous actions dictate future behavior, will attempt to control free flow of information on the internet. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit charity organization that does not want its many archived moments in internet history to be destroyed - as such, it's moved to Canada.

Donald Trump's impending presidency and Pompeo pick for CIA has sent downloads of secure encryption chat apps skyrocketing. According to the makers of the encrypted messaging app Signal, they've had a 400 percent growth increase since election day this month. Moxie Marlinspike, co-founder of OWS, makers of Signal, they've "never really seen any single event that's resulted in this kind of sustained, day-over-day interest." According to Marlinspike, this may be because of fears that Trump's impending control of "the least accountable surveillance apparatus in the history of the world."

Welcome to the year 2016 and November 8th, the day where the United States votes for their next President. In this futuristic time, we're able to watch some results of the election as they happen. Aside from the inevitable recounts in some close-race regions, today we're running down the best ways in which you can watch the election unfold over the next day-or-so.

Just when it seemed that Volkswagen was on the road to putting its emissions-cheating scandal in the past, new reports have pulled it back in. According to The Wall Street Journal, which spoke to sources close to the matter, California regulators have found software installed on some Audi models meant to cheat emissions tests. Should these reports turn out to be true, it could be the beginning of new headache for consumers.

Regardless of who's elected next week, in January the US will see a new transfer of presidential power. There's something different about this particular transfer of power, though, as it will be happening in the social media age. President Obama is the first president to utilize social media heavily, so what happens to all of those social media accounts when he has to hand off executive power to his successor?

Facebook's decision to begin collecting data from WhatsApp users has already drawn a negative reaction in Germany, but now the entire European Union is getting in on the action. Today, the European Commission's Article 29 Working Party has told Facebook to stop collecting that data as it carries out an investigation into these new policies.

Yahoo is at the center of a new damning report in which sources claim the company built its own software to spy on all incoming Yahoo Mail emails on behalf of the United States government. According to the sources, the software monitored the incoming emails for certain bits of information as provided by either the NSA or the FBI, resulting in “hundreds of millions” of accounts suffering privacy violations. This spying allegedly resulted in former Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos leaving the company, as sources say he disagreed with CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to comply with government orders.

The Wireless Emergency Alert system, which pushes AMBER Alerts and emergency notifications of things like natural disasters to phones across the US, is about to get something of an overhaul. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted today to expand the WEA system in a number of different ways, ranging from giving the alerts more characters to adding embedded URLs where it's appropriate.

While North Korea has a strong reputation for being secluded, controlling, and run by a totalitarian government, that doesn't mean the country is totally without the technology we take for granted in the western world. As we've seen before, the country makes its own computer and smartphone operating systems, such as the OS X-copying Red Star OS. And now, despite the fact that the internet barely exists there, they've even got their own streaming video service.

Moon Express has made history as the first private enterprise to get U.S. government permission for traveling to and landing on the moon. The planned mission, which still has some hurdles to overcome and will be of the unmanned variety, is currently scheduled to happen next year, and will involve Moon Express putting a robotic spacecraft of some sort on the lunar surface. The approval has been a long time coming, and includes involvement from the White House, Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, and the State Department.

The Centers for Disease Control have issued a warning for the Wynwood arts district in Miami, an area of the city where fourteen cases of zika virus have surfaced. The CDC advises pregnant women to avoid traveling in that area, and advises those who have visited the district since the middle of June to avoid getting pregnant for a minimum of two months. As well, pregnant women in Wynwood and those who have visited are being advised to get tested to see if they’re infected with the zika virus.

Yesterday, US authorities announced that Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents, was arrested in Poland on charges of copyright infringement and money laundering. It wasn't long after that KickassTorrents went down, as they usually do when something big like this happens to the person running the show. However, it would appear that KickassTorrents has returned to the Internet in at least some capacity, showing the quick turnaround dedicated torrent users can be capable of.